THIS episode was recorded on a wired connection and it covered many interesting topics from the past couple of weeks. Tim will post some show notes at a later date/time. Update: the show notes are up now.

Contents

Server

Mitel announced an updated version of its Linux-based Unified Communications server for the SMB market. The Mitel 5000 CP 5.0 adds support for up to 20 eight-party conferences, bidirectional synchronization of voice messages with email, dynamic extensions for up 10 associated devices, a new web portal, and a System Open Architecture Interface (OAI) Toolkit for third-party app integration.

Audiocasts/Shows

Google

We popped along to Google’s London HQ this week to talk Chrome OS, Google’s new low-resource Linux-based operating system for netbooks and notebooks.

Chrome OS product marketing manager, Eli Lassman, took us through the features of the CR-48 prototype portable which TechRadar saw last week and gave us some background on the imminent launch of notebooks featuring Chrome OS.

Ballnux

Android will represent 45 percent of global smartphone market share by 2016, while Samsung’s Bada OS may reach 10 percent, says ABI Research. Contrary to a recent IDC study, which estimated that Windows Phone 7 will be the number two platform in 2015, ABI says Microsoft will achieve only seven percent market share by 2016.

Kernel Space

There’s a rumor going around that we’re going to be launching our 20th Anniversary of Linux celebration activities next week.

Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s true. But, you’ll have to be either at The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit or watching the free, live video feed to get all the details (we’ll have a website you can go to afterward to get “the skinny” as well). Our working groups are also preparing to share some news that we’ll include here at Linux.com after it’s public.

A few months ago, I was talking to Jennifer Cloer, the Linux Foundation’s Director of Communications, and I asked her if she’d ever considered running a media training session for free software developers, which would help us improve the situation. She was very enthusiastic about it, and we quickly agreed that the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit would be a great opportunity to make it happen. We made contact with Amanda McPherson, who thought it was a good idea, and the deal was done. On Thursday April 7th, we will run a 4 hour session aimed at giving participants knowledge and tools to deal more effectively with the press.

Graphics Stack

Earlier this week was benchmarks of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 “Fermi” with the open-source Nouveau driver. The reverse-engineered Nouveau support for the GeForce 400/500 series is incomplete and requires users to generate their own custom firmware before there is even 2D/3D/video acceleration support. The initial tests on the GeForce GTX 460 also yielded a disturbingly large performance difference between the open-source and closed-source NVIDIA drivers, where as with previous generations of NVIDIA GPUs the performance difference is more manageable. Here is another look at Nouveau for Fermi, but this time from a GeForce GTX 485M.

Applications

Earth science (also known as geoscience) is the focus of understanding the sciences related to the planet Earth. It includes a wide range of fields such as geology, geography, geophysics, meteorology, oceanography, and glaciology. Some people are surprised to learn that astronomy is also regarded to be an earth science. Geology is generally considered to be the primary earth science.

According to Wikipedia, ‘to grok’ is to share the same reality or line of thinking with another physical or conceptual entity. For example, to say that you ‘know’ LISP is simply to assert that you can code in it if necessary — but to say you ‘grok LISP’ is to claim that you have deeply imbibed the world-view and spirit of the language, with the implication that it has transformed your view of programming.

Getting started with Django, or for that matter, Rails, typically involves creating a model. This is likely to be just a relational table. The framework creates a form with the option to insert, edit and delete records. And you have a working application in a matter of minutes.

The Grok tutorial (http://grok.zope.org/doc/current/tutorial.html) comes as a surprise; it starts with views and templates instead. Persistence of data ‘magically’ happens behind the scenes, using ZODB. The tutorial exposes you to the basic usage of Zope Page Templates and its relationship to the Python code. You will get a flavour of Grok quickly, though building a working application takes more effort.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

Q: Camp KDE is co-located this year with The Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit. Can you tell us about what attendees should expect at Hotel Kabuki?

Jeff: Co-locating with the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit gives us a great opportunity to engage with the attendees of the Collaboration Summit and in return, for our attendees to become part of a broader Linux event. As one of the largest open source communities in the world, collaboration, both internally and externally, is an important part of the KDE community experience. As a result, many of our attendees are looking forward to discussing collaboration techniques and technologies with the larger attendee base of the Collaboration Summit.

GNOME Desktop

I know this may not sound like good news to many but let me remind you that it will take another 6 months of development after Ubuntu 11.04 is released until Oneiric so even though Unity may seem a bit rough on the edges right now, it has a lot of time to improve.

Reviews

The installation failure leaves a sour taste in the mouth. It also reminds me why I’m usually wary of small distributions, since they are plagued with exponential complexity problems that stem from adding and removing components, without the ability to thoroughly check the consequences of these changes.

Starting with the false promise of a lightweight desktop, which turn out to be a Gnome, pimped up and polished, followed by an application crash and ending in a big fiasco, Neak failed the test of usability. MoonOS 3 was not the prettiest, but at least it worked fully. MoonOS 4 does not even install. Worse, it killed my PCLinuxOS installation. Luckily, Windows survived intact. This is a test box, so no worries there, but still.

The latest live build of GParted, version 0.8.0-5, is now based on Debian Sid. Another major improvement is the addition of ssh packages to this version. The team has also patched a bug related to setxkbmap.

The SliTaz team is pleased to announce the release of a new cooking ISO featuring over 2900 packages. All packages have been rebuilt using our new cooking tool, now included in tazwok. It contains Linux Kernel 2.6.37 compiled against glibc 2.13, binutils 2.21 & gcc 4.5.2. The Core LiveCD includes Midori 0.3.3. Tazpkg is now entirely translated to French and we are open to additional translations. Tazwok has been entirely rewritten and it’s now possible to recook SliTaz from Scratch using any ISO. This ISO is the first of a release candidate series which leads us to a stable 4.0 release.

Foresight is a Linux distribution for your desktop that features a rolling release schedule that always keeps your desktop up to date; a revolutionary package manager, Conary; the latest GNOME, KDE and Xfce desktop environment and an innovative set of excellent, up to date software applications.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

Red Hat Family

Open source operating system and middleware firm Red Hat may be about to snap up a business intelligence company, CBR has learned.

The news was confirmed in a CBR interview with CEO Jim Whitehurst here yesterday. Asked whether he agrees that business intelligence looks like a bit of a gap in the firm’s portfolio, Whitehurst said: “I think gap might be a strong word. When I think of gap I think of a hole with a piece missing. I think BI is a logical extension from a middleware portfolio.”

Debian Family

Canonical/Ubuntu

Ubuntu 11.04 dubbed Natty Narwhal will bring some major changes to the traditional Ubuntu desktop. As the conventional desktop gets a major overhaul, the spanking new Unity interface is busy preparing itself to replace the time-honored Gnome interface. Furthermore, some well-known default applications are getting replaced by newer and more feature-laden ones. While many users have welcomed these changes with open arms, a few disapproving nods have raised doubts over their success. Nevertheless, Ubuntu 11.04, which releases on 28th April 2011, promises to bring a burst of freshness to the Linux desktop along with a slew of new users.

A review of the beta release of Ubuntu 11.04 shows the problems that happen with regular releases and radical change. Things break and the system is rough. That’s the advantage of Debian GNU/Linux testing flavour. They put all that rough stuff in a separate branch of the distro until it’s ready. Ubuntu charges ahead like a bull in a China shop.

Lenses are one of the cool new features present in Ubuntu 11.04 and although the OS itself might not yet have been released properly, developers are already exploiting the opportunities that lenses – and the Unity desktop as a whole – provide.

The next version of Ubuntu, Natty Narwhal, will include the ability to try out apps before you install them. The feature right now can be accessed by installing a package, qtnx, through apt-get or otherwise. The package adds a “Test Drive” button on the software center, which will launch a full-fledged app you’re about to get into an environment.

Flavours and Variants

Peppermint Linux is a very light-weight, yet an awesome distro. It’s one of the minimalistic distros convenient for carrying around on a USB stick when heading off to solve your family’s “I HEARD YOU’RE GOOD WITH COMPUTERS” moments, although its focus isn’t primarily as a tool for fixing broken PCs – it’s more of an actual, desktop/laptop/netbook distro.

Permabit Technology on Tuesday announced an iteration of its Albireo primary data deduplication software for SMB network-attached storage systems based on Linux servers.

Albireo Virtual Data Optimizer (VDO), which will be available in the second half of this year, offers inline deduplication and optional data compression as a component of storage systems. Permabit sells a higher-end version of its Albireo deduplication product to NAS vendors such as BluArc, Xiotech and LSI Engenio.

HP released its WebOS 3.0 software development kit (SDK), which takes advantage of new features available on the recently announced HP TouchPad tablet. Meanwhile, HP’s new CEO Leo Apotheker offered more details on how HP plans to spread WebOS across multiple devices and establish partnerships with smaller companies to expand the Linux-based platform.

OSADL (Open Source Automation Development Lab) announced four new members, including new “silver” member AMD. OSADL, which has begun testing real-time Linux on AMD’s G-Series processors, also announced “bronze” memberships for Spanish software engineering firm DSM4, German automotive technology manufacturer Eberspacher, and Austrian industrial research firm OpenTech EDV.

Phones

Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

As we announced earlier, Nokia will no longer refer to official releases as Symbian ^3 or Symbian^4, but will deliver continuous evolution of the platform to partners and customers – including consumers. In line with this approach we are not delivering software builds, but do offer build tools through this website, and a SDK through Forum Nokia.

I take issue with Nokia’s use of the word “open”. Let me show you the new license, then we can compare it to the old, and you can be the judge as to whether this is a move to openness or even treading water in place, or as I view it, the exact opposite.

Steven Elop was very generous in his admission of the role played by Africa and Asia in the success of Nokia and promised to “reward such disproportionate achievements with disproportionate investments”, though he did not explain as to what disproportionate investment would mean.

Now that it’s clear Elop has not completely sold out to Microsoft, we’d want to see a change in so many things, not least is the perpetual delays in the delivery of devices on their schedule date. I’d also personally like to see Africa’s loyalty to Nokia rewarded with the possible siting of a plant here on the continent. So yes Nokia will remain an independent company from Redmond, but will that last forever?

Partly thanks to Verizon Wireless’ 4G LTE network, HTC’s Thunderbolt is the fastest phone eWEEK has tested. The $250 price for the Android 2.2 phone is high, and HTC and Verizon need to work on extending battery life, but users who have access to Verizon’s 4G network will be sorely tempted by the Thunderbolt’s speed, big screen, and nicely tuned eight-megapixel camera, says this eWEEK review.

Inflight telephony vendor Aircell announced its first Android-based phone, designed specifically for business aircraft. Due later this year, the Aircell Smartphone offers a 3.8-inch screen, said to be the largest available in the aviation telephony market.

Amidst all the chaos surrounding the Qt project, the power of open source software has shown itself. The Romanian developer Bogdan Vatra has ported Qt to Android. To avoid trademark conflicts, the result was named Necessitas.

Before looking at how to setup the tools and build an application, lets look at the system from the users’ view. When downloading a Qt based application, the size matters. The classic wiggly example that has shipped with Qt since the dawn of time is only about 113kB. Animated Tiles, provided by Bogdan Vatra, requires a 153kB download.

Tablets

HCL Infosystems announced three Android 2.2 tablets for the Indian market, featuring one-button access to HCL’s India-focused Touch online service. The “ME” tablets include the seven-inch ME AE7 and ME AM7, both with 800MHz processors, as well as the 10-inch, 1GHz ME AP10, says the company.

HTC is about the hit the iWorld with its Flyer Tablet. The tablet is far more advanced than the iPad. Steve Jobs was right when he said “We’re going to use the best pointing device in the world,” he says. “A device we’re all born with. Our fingers.” But, we need to do more than just pointing. Its the complex combination of fingers to manipulate a tool which makes them the best writing/drawing devices as well. The device was invented ages ago — its called pen/pencil.

Google is one of the few companies which prefer looking ahead than holding onto the past. The company did not waste a week in breaking Android down and rebuilding it from scratch for tablets. Honeycomb is today far more advanced than generic iOS.

The open source world, moreover, is full of multinational personalities — from Mark Shuttleworth, who holds dual-citizenship in the United Kingdom and South Africa and who lives on the semi-autonomous Isle of Man, to Richard Stallman, who takes pride in his polylingualism and has sworn off employment in his native United States. And Linus Torvalds himself, of course, was born into the small Swedish-speaking minority of Finland, and now resides in Oregon.

North Bridge Venture Partners today announced the continuation of its highly successful annual Future of Open Source Survey. In 2011, North Bridge is pleased to welcome The 451 Group as a major partner in the survey. The survey, which involves more than 20 industry collaborators and polls a wide variety of members of the open source community, will reveal the most important issues, opportunities and future expectations of the industry in 2011. Open to the general public beginning on March 21, the survey has a target close date of April 22. The survey results will be presented during the Open Source Leaders keynote panel on opening day of this year’s Open Source Business Conference (May 16, 2011 at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square). Moderating this panel will be Michael Skok, general partner at North Bridge Venture Partners. Michael will be joined on the panel by: Jim Whitehurst, CEO, Red Hat, Tom Erickson, CEO, Acquia, Mike Olson, CEO, Cloudera, and Adrian Kunzle, managing director, JP Morgan.

With tight budgets ahead as far as the eye can see, NASA is increasingly looking toward open source technology and the help of a volunteer community to help out. The U.S. space agency hosted its first Open Source Summit this week to reach out to the open source community and explain its often confusing and incompatible open source license.

Published on 31/03/11 – Breaking news on the browser market in March 2011 with two expected releases: Internet Explorer 9 on the 15th March, and Firefox 4 on the 22nd. What follows is the first results of the battle between the latest versions of the most used browsers in Europe.

Mozilla, the non-profit organisation behind the Firefox web browser, has announced that it’s proposed “Do Not Track” (DNT) header is gaining industry support. In a post on the Mozilla Blog, Alex Fowler, Technology and Privacy Officer for the Mozilla Foundation, says that “Two developments bring it closer to being respected by industry”.

Browser add-ons are a great way of bolting on new functionality and customizing the experience to a high degree. But they’re also a great way of slowing down browser quite a lot, which is why Mozilla is introducing several new measures to cut down on poorly optimized add-ons for Firefox.

SaaS

Today, the OpenNebula project announces the general availability of the final release of OpenNebula 2.2.0. This is a stable version and it is targeted at production deployments. Clouds running any OpenNebula 2.0.x versions are recommended to upgrade to this release.

Edging ever closer to enterprise software maturity, the Hive data warehouse software has been updated with new capabilities considered essential for production use, such as indexing, concurrency and advances in authentication management.

Hadoop, the open-source file system and MapReduce implementation for massive-scale data, was the talk of the conference Wednesday at our Structure Big Data conference in New York. From new Hadoop distributions to end-customers’ plans, Hadoop was all anyone could talk about. One of the companies whose name crept up in conversations was a stealth-mode company called Mapr, which is building a proprietary version of Hadoop and is likely to launch later this year.

Zenoss Inc., a leading provider of management software for physical, virtual, and cloud-based IT environments, today announced the availability of Zenoss Datacenter Insight. With this release, Zenoss became the first to deliver a solution capable of analyzing today’s dynamic cloud-based infrastructures, providing unified analytics and reporting of all physical, virtual, and cloud-based IT resources.

OpenStack is a collection of open source technologies delivering a massively scalable cloud operating system, and it is supported by a global software community that is collaborating to enable any organization to create and offer cloud computing services running on standard hardware. Gluster intends to expand its contributions beyond its initial OpenStack endeavors, with the goal of ultimately delivering virtual appliances that complement the OpenStack framework and deliver scale-out storage for the cloud. Notable participants and contributors include Rackspace (NYSE: RAX) and NASA.

From a posting to the Harmony-dev list earlier this week, the long-term standing PMC (Tim Ellison) is stepping down.

At this point, it is unclear who if anyone will step up to the Harmony project. Due to the licensing dispute over the rights for an open-source project to implement an alternative implementation of Java, the Harmony project will never be able to call itself a JavaVM or an implementation of the Java core language libraries.

Databases

Ravel, an Austin, Texas-based company, wants to provide a supported, open-source version of Google’s Pregel software called GoldenOrb to handle large-scale graph analytics. Ravel COO Zach Richardson told me at our Structure: Big Data event last week that the company would release the GoldenOrb code on March 31 and explained how such databases can help run analytics on massive amounts of data across huge numbers of nodes without taking as much time as Hadoop or MapReduce. He also explains that Ravel will introduce enterprise versions of GoldenOrb and Apache Mahout, an open-source, machine-learning platform that utilizes Hadoop to analyze large data sets.

It’s been a long and crazy road to get to this point and the team would like to thank everyone that has helped us get here. Every patch, bug report, and thought-provoking question has been invaluable in getting Drizzle this solid.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

Now I’ve never been a big fan of OpenOffice. I saw it as a huge pile of legacy code with little future. Part of that was due to the “WE OWN OPENOFFICE” Governance from Sun/Oracle, part due the the slowness and UI horror.

Java Community Process Executive Committee, which has become an Oracle-IBM owned body post Apache’s exit, has approve the Java Specification Request (JSR) for the next release of the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 7 – JSR 342.

Oracle said in a press statement that Java EE 7 will further enhance the Java EE platform for cloud environments. As a result, Java EE 7 based applications and products will be able to more easily operate on private or public clouds and deliver their functionality as a service with support for features such as multi-tenancy and elasticity (horizontal scaling).

Business

Open source ERP software vendor OpenERP has launched an online apps library with more than 1,000 free applications.

The OpenERP-based applications are all open source, and range from complete applications like CRM, accounting, project management and inventory management to specific applications like fleet management, marketing campaign automation, eCommerce integration and point-of-sale.

Infobright, the open source analytic database company, today announced with Zend Technologies, the PHP Company, a new benchmark demonstrating that their products, when used together, deliver higher performance in database analytics for PHP-based Web applications. As more companies move their business online, they need real-time access to data and analytics for informed decision-making about sales, customer behavior, financial trends and more. Infobright and Zend have teamed up to provide developers with tools to quickly build PHP applications that can capture and analyze this data in a highly dynamic environment.

OpenERP is launching today its Apps library, where all the OpenERP-based applications are open source! With more than 1,000 applications and growing, available for free, OpenERP Apps is one of the world’s biggest repositories of enterprise management applications.

Semi-Open Source

Alfresco Software, the open platform for social content management, and Jive Software today announced a partnership to bring best of breed content management and social business software together for customers. The companies are collaborating with Jive consulting partner, SolutionSet to deliver an Alfresco-Jive connector that brings enterprise-class repository functionality to Jive content and allows Alfresco content to behave as native Jive content.

Funding

The funds, disclosed this week, come from OVP Venture Partners and the Oregon Angel Fund. They are part of an expected $5.8 million funding round, said Stuart Cohen, the company’s CEO and former head of nonprofit Open Source Development Labs.

Government

The Cabinet Office publication of a procurement policy note on open standards for government IT requirements is the latest in a long line of policy requirements concerning both open standards and open source.

Minister for the Cabinet Office Francis Maude outlined the plans today, promising to create a level playing field for open source software and impose compulsory open standards, starting with interoperability and security.

“For too long, Government has wasted vast amounts of money on ineffective and duplicate IT systems,” said Maude. “We will end the oligopoly of big business supplying government IT by breaking down contracts into smaller, more flexible projects. This will open up the market to SMEs and new providers.”

The two open source tools are called IT Dashboard and TechStat Toolkit, and Kundra writes:

“We launched the IT Dashboard and the TechStat Accountability Sessions to improve IT transparency and accountability across the Federal Government. The Dashboard has helped us shine a light on IT projects, providing performance data to fuel TechStat reviews, which have led to over $3 billion in cost reductions. Today we are releasing the software code of the IT Dashboard and the TechStat toolkit to the public for two reasons. First, to take the platform to the next level, we want to tap into the collective talents and ingenuity of the American people, to enhance functionality, improve the code and address existing challenges such as those identified by David Powner and his team at GAO. Second, CIOs from across the country and around the world such as Maarten Hillenaar of the Netherlands, Kyle Schafer in West Virginia and Jason DeHaan of the City of Chicago are all interested in implementing these platforms in their respective organizations.”

The other, even if it is tokenistic, plus is the publication of the report in Open Document Format, a truly open standard. (It is also available in Word and as a PDF). A government spokeswoman did admit that she didn’t actually have anyway of opening an ODT document and it is noticeable that on the web page they don’t have an icon for ODT, but it is at least a move in the right direction.

Slightly more concerning is the presumption against any IT contract that will cost more than £100 million over its lifetime.

Licensing

Openness/Sharing

Among unsung open source collaboration efforts, the FIRST annual robotics competition deserves much more attention than it gets. Aimed at students, including young children, noted inventor of the Segway scooter Dean Kamen is behind the program, which challenges students to develop open source robotics software and components, with prizes for the winners. This program tends to fly mostly under the radar, but year after year it produces ever more interesting incentives for students.

Open Hardware

Limor Fried is a maker’s maker. Sure, she’s got prime geek credentials: She earned an electrical engineering degree from MIT, invented several delightfully nerdy things to do with Altoid tins, and reverse-engineered the legendary Roland TB-303 synthesizer. Now she runs Adafruit Industries, a New York City company that makes open source electronics kits and components for the growing tide of DIYers who are inventing the future. But that’s not why she’s on the cover of Wired. This is why:

Intel announced today that Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president and general manager of its Ultra Mobility Group (UMG), will be leaving the company. While a reason for the resignation was not cited, it could be related to the chip giant’s failure to obtain smartphone design wins for its Atom processor.

Programming

Google Summer of Code is a world-wide program that encourages students to participate in coding Open Source software by offering a paid stipend for participation in the project. Students are paired with a mentor from one of the registered projects.

Revolution Analytics, the leading commercial provider of R software, services and support, and IBM Netezza today announced a partnership to integrate Revolution R Enterprise and the IBM Netezza TwinFin ® Data Warehouse Appliance. For the first time, customers seeking to run high performance and full-scale predictive analytics from within a data warehouse platform will be able to directly leverage the power of the open source R statistics language. Under the terms of the agreement, the companies will work together to create a version of Revolution’s software that takes advantage of IBM Netezza’s i-class technology so that Revolution R Enterprise can run in-database in an optimal fashion.

The Eclipse Foundation is pleased to announce that developers may now sign-up for access to a beta version of the OrionHub service, a hosted implementation of Orion. Orion is a new Eclipse initiative to define a platform for building and integrating web development tools. An early release of Orion provides web developers with an editor for JavaScript, HTML and CSS that runs in popular browsers and the ability to easily link with popular web-based tools. The OrionHub service provided by the Eclipse Foundation will allow developers to experiment with Orion and provide feedback to the Orion open source community.

Standards/Consortia

Not that long ago the TV screen and the computer monitor were two very separate and distinct devices. That’s no longer the case.

In an effort to try and help guide best practices and standards for a converged world, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has setup a Web and TV Interest Group. The charter for the group is for it to help identify requirements and potential solutions to ensure that the Web will work well with TV. The group recently held a meeting to help identify some of the issues that are currently facing the converged Web and TV world.

While he actively particpiated in the odf plugfest he also took time out to interview some of the key attendees at the event and has been kindly agreed to let us post the interview he did with Mark Taylor.

Science

Meet Jacob Barnett, now 12 years old, mildly autistic and with an IQ of 170 – higher than Stephen Hawkings and Albert Einstein. At age three, he was solving 5,000 piece jigsaw puzzles and now he’s already got a paid research position at Indiana University.

For a taster of this little man’s out-of-this-world genius, watch this (and enjoy his mother’s comedic timing). There are plenty more videos on his mother’s YouTube channel too.

Hardware

Ironically, Intel made an statement quite contrary to what Oracle says. Intel’s president and chief executive officer Paul Otellini, said, “Intel’s work on Intel Itanium processors and platforms continues unabated with multiple generations of chips currently in development and on schedule. We remain firmly committed to delivering a competitive, multi-generational roadmap for HP-UX and other operating system customers that run the Itanium architecture.”

Cablegate

Last January, the Government Accountability Project (GAP) and New York radio station WNYC sought help from the public to find out which senator put an anonymous secret hold on the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, killing the bill at the end of the last congressional term.

Today sees the depressing milestone that Bradley Manning has been imprisoned for 300 days. I was proud to speak at the rally in support of him on the 20th March outside the US Embassy, like demonstrators across the globe.

For over seven months he has been held in military arrest in conditions that most of us could not imagine enduring. To be confined in a tiny windowless cell. To be held in solitary confinement 23 hours a day. To be forced to stand naked. To be put under intolerable psychological pressure. No wonder that Clive Stafford Smith, director of Reprieve, likened the conditions to those in Guantanamo Bay.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

The billionaire Koch brothers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to gain political influence and change America. Their work and spending is driven by the goal of increasing their own profit through decreasing regulations. The expansive and diverse nature of their efforts makes it overwhelming to keep tabs of all they’ve done that has caused harm. And that’s why Brave New Foundation is going to keep connecting the dots and telling the full story of what they’ve done to our country.

Our work at Brave New Films has always focused on the best way to tell the full story, to connect all the moving pieces and to highlight how one example of a problem in our democracy is always representative of a larger problem

The disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant hasn’t stopped some U.S. legislators from insisting U.S. nuclear power plants are completely safe, but that support may be based less on facts than on financial influence.

Finance

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) tapped the Federal Reserve’s discount window at least five times since September 2008, according to central bank data that contradict an executive’s testimony last year.

Goldman Sachs Bank USA, a unit of the company, took overnight loans from the Federal Reserve on Sept. 23, Oct. 1, and Oct. 23 in 2008 as well as on Sept. 9, 2009, and Jan. 11, 2010, according to the data released today. The largest loan was $50 million on Sept. 23 and the smallest was $1 million on the most recent two occasions.

The March 19 issue of The Economist included a special report on The Future of the State. In an excellent series of articles, the special report explains why the continuing growth of government is no longer sustainable, especially in the more advanced economies with aging populations like the US and Western Europe. It highlights what some governments are doing to address the problem, especially Singapore and Britain. Finally, the report offers a set of recommendations that governments might follow if they want to get a handle on the extremely complex and challenging problem of reforming the state.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

A new special interest group has purchased an expensive TV ad campaign in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race but operates out of a UPS store. The self-named “Citizens for a Strong America” (CSA) advertises its address as “834 Park Avenue #306″ in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, but this address is nothing more than a box at a UPS Store. The TV ad campaign attacks Supreme Court candidate JoAnne Kloppenburg for an ad that was not created by her campaign. The ad CSA is complaining about argues that Supreme Court candidate Justice David Prosser failed to prosecute a priest who young boys said had molested them. (CMD does not endorse or oppose either candidate; CMD reports on front groups, PR campaigns, and spin, with a particular focus on corporate-funded spin.)

A FOX News station has been sent a notice of a proposed fine for airing fake news in the form of a “video news release” (VNR) without disclosing that the “news” segment featuring General Motors was produced to promote GM’s cars.

Censorship

As the European Commission’s consultation on the revision of the anti-sharing directive (IPRED) is coming to an end, let’s look at a hearing that took place in January at the European Court of Justice. At issue is the injunction pronounced by a Belgian judge forcing an Internet Access Provider (IAP) to implement broad filtering mechanisms to block all unauthorized transmissions of copyrighted works. In this case, the Commission is pushing forward a pro-copyright industry approach by calling for more repression. Such increased repression is also promoted through the upcoming revision of IPRED. It has to be stopped.

Civil Rights/Koch

The Governor of Maine, Paul LePage, ordered a commemorative public mural depicting Maine’s labor history be removed from the state’s Department of Labor, saying he had gotten complaints that the artwork was too pro-labor. The 36-feet long, 8-foot tall work by Judy Taylor of Tremont, Maine depicts workers like Rosie the Riveter, child laborers, shoemakers, textile workers, strikers and the first female American cabinet member, Frances Perkins, who served as U.S. Labor Secretary.

So why are so many corporate-funded ad campaigns pushing the idea that public sector workers are Public Enemy Number One, and why now?

As with so many other PR tactics corporations are using right now, we need to look to the tobacco industry — the original authors of corporate America’s PR Playbook — to better understand the persuasive efforts filling the media landscape that are designed to shape public sentiment towards various sectors of American workers.

A previously-secret, internal Philip Morris (PM) presentation from 1996 reveals that company’s long-term plan to divide the ranks of anti-smoking advocacy groups, like the American Lung Association, the American Cancer Society the American Heart Association and others, to weaken their joint efforts to reduce smoking rates. Just like public sector workers, these organizations command tremendous credibility with the public. When these groups join together to advance a single cause, they muster significant power to sway public and legislative opinion. When these organizations unite to advocate effective policies, like public smoking restrictions, together they can really make a difference. Thus these nonprofits were formidable opponents for tobacco companies, and a force that PM needed to hobble.

Billionaires Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries are funneling $5.6 million through the astroturf group FreedomWorks for an Ohio TV ad campaign starting March 18, 2011 that continues the attack on labor unions that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker started in February.

Charlatan Glenn Beck launched an absurd effort to discredit concerns about the cascading failures of the nuclear plants in Japan in the wake of the 9.0 quake and tsunami. In a genuinely shocking and callous segment on his radio show, Beck literally laughed off concerns about the potential nuclear meltdown.

Intellectual Monopolies

La Quadrature du Net has sent its submission to the European consultation on the “Intellectual Property Rights” Directive (IPRED). The citizen organization asks the EU Commission to renounce to increasing repression against the sharing of cultural goods over the Internet, and calls for an open-minded reflection on the future of copyright, patent and trademarck law. Lawmakers, citizens and NGOs must all engage in this crucial debate that will directly shape the future of the Internet.

Trademarks

Apple has become progressively more aggressive about its products’ trademarks lately. The more talked-about example has been its aggression regarding the term “App Store” The problem is that Apple itself would refer to “app store” generically and even talked about other companies’ possible “app stores”, yet now, when Microsoft wants to make an “app store” for the Windows Phone operating system, Apple is claiming that “App” is short for “Apple”. This is truly disingenuous because practically every app developer on the face of this planet and many users out there too know that “app” has always stood for “application”, not “Apple”. Well, this sort of behavior has gone on even further. Many thanks to the good folks at Tuxmachines and LXer for providing the links; you can go to those sites to follow the original links. Follow the jump to read more.

Copyrights

Less than a week after her investiture ceremony, U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell laid down a landmark verdict that will make it easy for copyright holders to send cash demands to people they suspect of copyright infringement. Many people called the decision into doubt, and the revelation that Judge Howell previously worked as an RIAA lobbyist and as the Managing Director of a pirate-chasing outfit hints at a conflict of interest.

Digital Economy (UK)/HADOPI

Comparisons were then drawn with the French ‘Hadopi’ scheme, with evidence from the MPA suggesting that while Hadopi was “more aggressive” than the DEA, the European Commission’s objections to it had apparently been resolved; the argument being that if Hadopi was acceptable to the EC, so must the (allegedly weaker) DEA.